The Weakest Link - Phantom Power Champion - Emperor Penguin - Printable Version
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The Weakest Link - Phantom Power Champion - Emperor Penguin - gsmacleod - 12-03-2017
With Poets getting the most votes, it is eliminated and we're down to the final two.
Eliminated Round 1
The Rules
Membership
Save the Planet
Eliminated Round 2
Fireworks
Chagrin Falls
Thompson Girl
Eliminated Round 3
Something On
Vapour Trails
Eliminated Round 4
Bobcaygeon
Eliminated Round 5
Poets
Vote for the song you believe to be the weakest on Phantom Power and after 48 hours, we will remove the song that has the most votes and declare out Champion.
The poll will end Tuesday at 12:34pm Eastern.
Happy voting!
Shane
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - Chris Tanz - 12-04-2017
The darkest timeline has proven to be true!
ct
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - Killer Whale Tank - 12-04-2017
Chris Tanz Wrote:The darkest timeline has proven to be true!
ct
No kidding. You can add the clinically insane elimination of 'Poets' to the election of Trump as further evidence of that.
One small mercy is that the superior song, 'Penguin,' is ahead in this poll...so far at least.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - potsie - 12-04-2017
I will take small consolation in Emperor winning after the elimination of Poets. Still recovering after that disappointment.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - cochise - 12-04-2017
Upon closing of the Phantom Power votes, I think things are going to get fairly interesting from here on out. MAW and all other releases going forward, I think we'll end up seeing a lot more diversity/opinions on what is considered the weakest than what we have seen to date.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - Killer Whale Tank - 12-04-2017
potsie - it's roughly analogous to NOIS losing to 'Another Mindight.' :lol:
I suspect that this wildly counter-intuitive result to be explained by a combination of folks voting against 'overplayed' songs, and a related tendency among a certain type of hard-core fan to make a *point* of favouring deep cuts over the obvious choices. There were some close calls in the earlier polls, so I suppose it was inevitable that we'd get a bizarre Black Swan result sooner or later.
Fortunately in the rest of the known universe, 'Poets' will continue to get vastly more love than 'Escape,' as is its due. :wink:
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - knightrider - 12-04-2017
Killer Whale Tank Wrote:...folks voting against 'overplayed' songs, and a related tendency among a certain type of hard-core fan to make a *point* of favouring deep cuts over the obvious choices...Or, musical tastes are inherently subjective and like others apparently, I simply don't love Poets as much as I love a couple other tracks on the album. Never have. Love the ones you love. No one is wrong. Right? :thumb:
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - nestene1 - 12-04-2017
knightrider Wrote:Love the ones you love. No one is wrong. Right? :thumb:
“What you believe you say without shame, ‘I just do’”
Oh, wrong album...
:wink:
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - Killer Whale Tank - 12-04-2017
That's actually a line I cordially dislike 8) I don't agree that we shouldn't discuss and dialogue about our beliefs, with an eye to explaining and better understanding them, and possibly even revising them based on that discussion. In fact it seems very unlike the way Gord Downie actually comported himself - he seems to have been genuinely interested in exploring, discussing, learning, and potentially changing in light of that.
As for the idea that every preference is as good as every other preference, I don't really agree with that either. It's true to some extent, but the notion that surfing porn all day is "just as worthwhile" as immersing oneself in Shakespeare, or that a porn video is "just as good" as Macbeth, is a ridiculously reductive view. I'm sure that many people on this site would prefer to read "Coke Machine Glow" than T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but there's no way that Gord's "poetry" can hold a candle to that masterwork - and, again, it's a preposterous leveling that wants to insist that it can. The Waste Land is richer on every level.
As far as these polls go, I've raised this before, but it's still worth asking *why* we prefer the songs we do. Are people selecting certain deep cuts for the reasons I suggest above, i.e., the classic tracks are 'overplayed,' or else the desire of some hard-core fans to distinguish themselves from the masses by favouring more obscure cuts? Neither would represent a fair basis of evaluation IMHO. A third factor is the old "association" game - e.g., if I got laid for the first time while Taylor Swift was playing, I may have powerfully positive associations with Taylor Swift. And that's fair enough, but it doesn't make her a better artist than Gord Downie and the Hip, an ideally (IMHO) we'd try to separate these arbitrary associations from our assessment of a song, as a song.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - potsie - 12-04-2017
cochise Wrote:Upon closing of the Phantom Power votes, I think things are going to get fairly interesting from here on out. MAW and all other releases going forward, I think we'll end up seeing a lot more diversity/opinions on what is considered the weakest than what we have seen to date.
Agree. The M@W vote will be all over the map. However, I think the greatest mess will be with World Container. I have absolutely no idea what is going to come out on top for that one. There is no clear favourite on there, for either the casual fan or the hardcore fan. There are at least half a dozen songs that have a chance.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - andrew sharpe - 12-04-2017
Killer Whale Tank Wrote:As for the idea that every preference is as good as every other preference, I don't really agree with that either. It's true to some extent, but the notion that surfing porn all day is "just as worthwhile" as immersing oneself in Shakespeare, or that a porn video is "just as good" as Macbeth, is a ridiculously reductive view.This argument only works when you control the definition of good.
Killer Whale Tank Wrote:As far as these polls go, I've raised this before, but it's still worth asking *why* we prefer the songs we do. Are people selecting certain deep cuts for the reasons I suggest above, i.e., the classic tracks are 'overplayed,' or else the desire of some hard-core fans to distinguish themselves from the masses by favouring more obscure cuts?Posting on a site with a few dozen people as some kind of preconceived method of distinguishing oneself...does that really strike you as more probable than our own justification...that we enjoy hearing Escape more than Poets?
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - Killer Whale Tank - 12-04-2017
andrew sharpe Wrote:This argument only works when you control the definition of good.
Posting on a site with a few dozen people as some kind of preconceived method of distinguishing oneself...does that really strike you as more probable than our own justification...that we enjoy hearing Escape more than Poets?
On the first point: the same is true of your own argument, so that's no help.
On the latter, I do think that this is a common tendency among hard-core fans, of most artists - the tendency to lionize the obscure over the 'overplayed' and the popular. In saying that, of course, I'm certainly not saying everyone who votes for an obscure cut is necessarily doing that. As I noted, I'm interested in *why* people like X over Y and think we can ask the question; and throw that out as one plausible contributor to 'black swan' results.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - loach - 12-04-2017
I've said this in previous polls on this album, but I initially didn't connect with Poets at all. For the first few years after the PP release, I tended to skip Poets, and I was disappointed it was chosen as the lead single and as one of the songs they played for the Queen at the jubilee. I'm not sure I could really say why, it just wasn't a melody I cared for and lyrics that I couldn't really relate to or apply to something going on in my life (I didn't really want to hear what poets are doing, but I didn't really feel strongly about not wanting to hear about what they were up to either...)
After seeing it live a few times, my view on Poets started to change. Started to love how the audience would breathe life in it, including the little extra live additions ("Bring out your dead!") that usually went with it. It went from being in the bottom 3 on the album for me to where now it's probably around #4 or so. The point here is that I didn't vote against it because it is 'overplayed'. If anything, it's ubiquity at concerts helped me to hear it differently from my initial impressions and move it up my list. In the previous albums here, it's not the deep cuts that I have in my top two songs, but Phantom Power is just different that way for me.
In the end, it's really as simple as Andrew said above. Some of us just would rather listen to Escape and Emperor over Poets, and for me, it's been that way since I first got the album.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - andrew sharpe - 12-05-2017
Killer Whale Tank Wrote:My argument is that it cannot be defined. There are many classical fans that think all rock music, including your precious Dylan, is hollow and uninteresting when measured against 50 person orchestras, synchronized into long, meaningful opus' with real depth of volume, tone and instrumentation. Can you really argue against them? Dylan's music is relatively simplistic compared to classical...does that make it less "good"? And what about a 70 year old Mongolian farmer who has grown up on throat singing? If there is a universal barometer of good, we should expect him to realize that Dylan is superior to Mariah?andrew sharpe Wrote:This argument only works when you control the definition of good.
On the first point: the same is true of your own argument, so that's no help.
My point: It's all point of view. We assign an order to art purely to serve our own egos. It's the same with many other things. Molson Canadian is an old family recipe, brewed with more quality control and science than any craft. Yet to many (including me), it's an "inferior" beer. Why? Because it serves my ego to drink $14 small batch brews that can only be found in some dank corner of Waterloo.
Killer Whale Tank Wrote:On the latter, I do think that this is a common tendency among hard-core fans, of most artists - the tendency to lionize the obscure over the 'overplayed' and the popular. In saying that, of course, I'm certainly not saying everyone who votes for an obscure cut is necessarily doing that. As I noted, I'm interested in *why* people like X over Y and think we can ask the question; and throw that out as one plausible contributor to 'black swan' results.Why is Escape even a black swan? It was common on set lists, was on the best of album and has been a fan favourite since day one...is it a "deep cut" just because it wasn't a single?
Full disclosure: I love Poets. My favourite Hip video, and I never tired of hearing it live. I just like Escape better. Anytime you put GS out front, it rules (Grace, Too being the best example). I like the sentimentality of the song, I like the imagery of the chamber maid singing the same song woven throughout the verses as a response to the narrator looking for his friend, I love Sinclair's groove, I love how the song rises and falls, and I love Johnny's tasteful rhythm. I like how Gord's melody matches the band's, without being the exact same...and "times beyond a heartbeat" is a great lyric.
I just like it better.
Re: The Weakest Link - Phantom Power - Championship Round - Killer Whale Tank - 12-05-2017
I like your discussion of "Escape," that's good stuff.
On the other stuff, I note that you attribute all attempts to discern better and worse artistic creation as "ego," yet scorn the notion that privileging obscure cuts might also be a form of "ego." Funny how ego is everywhere and nowhere. And as far as the definition of "good" goes, you yourself have a definition - i.e., one that axiomatically reduces any distinctions between artistic work by reducing it all to unfathomable and completely arbitrary personal preferences. In other words, you define "good" in such a way as to make qualitative distinctions impossible. The consequences of this don't make sense; e.g., like many people here, I play some guitar on the side, but I'm a chunka-chunka-chunka primitive rhythm guitar player who is basically incompetent. If I decide that I am "as good" a guitarist as Rob B., or as "good" a singer as Gord D. - let alone Pavarotti - that don't make it so, and no one with the slightest taste or judgement would think it so. (Similarly, my drunken philosophizing does not make me as powerful a philosopher as Nietzsche or Plato, and the "poems" I wrote as a teen don't make me as good as TS Eliot, any more than Gord D's "poetry" can hold a candle to an Eliot, or Yeats, or Larkin, etc.).
Your example of classical orchestral musicians disliking Dylan is interesting, and again, that opens up more useful avenue of discussion. (Interestingly one of my best friends is a classical viola player, and he loves Dylan, but that's a side note). You are absolutely right that it would be ridiculous to assess Dylan by the standards of classical music. He works within a completely different idiom; but that just means he has to be evaluated by different criteria. But that doesn't mean his work can't be *evaluated.* And of course, this 'evaluation' doesn't unfold according to mathematical criteria, but rather is a world of aesthetic judgement. I suspect your basic assumption is that unless something can be quantified (e.g., Bill Gates has more money than me) it cannot be subjected to meaningful assessments.